MixedThe Financial Times\"This second novel does not work so well. At any rate it failed to frighten me. It is too much of a pastiche; vivid enough, but too self-conscious for its own good. Though there’s an obvious connecting theme – that the ghosts of the past return to take vengeance on the present – Waters fails to capitalise on it … In The Little Stranger, the feeling is that Waters has done her research properly and the book will adapt brilliantly to the screen, but she doesn’t believe … I stayed up into the small hours absorbed by the book, even while I was fuming at its failings, and didn’t regret it one bit.\
